With Tom and Dirk both out of commission we’re feeling the pressure to link blog! Luckily not much is going on, because everyone is as focused on the holidays as we are! However, here are things from the past two weeks or so that we had bookmarked:

Yes, the place was a pit. But for the three years before I moved back home to Dallas, it was my pit. And I stopped by there at least once a year whenever I came to visit, just to see how the place had changed. And changed it did. The owner changed at least twice over the years. The staff somewhat more frequently than that. And the last time I went in the shop had branched out and become equal parts comic shop, skate store and weapons dealer. Only in America, ladies and gentlemen, could you get a custom skateboard, a pair of nunchucks and the latest issue of Action Comics in one store. Maybe such a thing is only possible in Texas, for that matter.

Just finished my last 3 covers to Crossing Midnight and my single interior page contribution to issue 16, fully colored by myself as well (click on image below). It saddens me that my participation in this series is ending so soon. I really enjoy working on it and really tried to give the covers an unusual perspective while still being creatively dynamic. Overall I think I was successful at that, though there is a couple weak spots in my opinion. This series is fantastic in every way. Please pick up the trades as they come out. You won’t be disappointed by the creator’s efforts.

§ Speaking of rumors, there’s one going around (that we haven’t actually seen a link to) that Comics Buyers Guide is ceasing publication in 2008. Both a letter from editor Brent Frankenhoff and a blog post byMaggie Thompson say this rumor is rated HOOEY.

A good number of the entries in “The Best American Comics 2007” show the pitfalls of this. Take, for instance, Jeffrey Brown’s “These Things, These Things,” a lo-fi slice of life involving a guy named Jeff who fails at romance with a girl named Sophia and finds meaning in the music of Andrew Bird. It’s competent enough but oh so slight. Puzzling over what might qualify it as among the best of the year, I read Brown’s brief statement in the back of the book. “I found that over a fairly short period of time, the music of Andrew Bird seemed to have crept in and infiltrated my life in a number of ways, and then I realized this had been happening long before I was aware of it,” he said. “Somehow his music had become a kind of map to part of my life.”

And from that, a best American comic was born. It would be wrong to expect comics to provide the highly constructed, didactic narratives that are supplied in abundance by other art forms, like, say, television. But reading through this book, you see how autobiography becomes a trap, a limit on creativity. Readers have their own existential torpor to sort through; they don’t necessarily need someone else’s.